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Take this link for the Paper Topics (in pdf format).

A student will select one of the topics to write a 5 page (+/- half a page)paper on. The paper will require at least 6 academic references (4 of which must be from peer-reviewed journal articles). Detailed instructions are available on the Paper Topic pages (see link above).

Submitting the Paper

The paper must be turned in to the instructor by 18 November by 10:35 AM. For every day, including weekends and holidays, the paper is late, starting at 10:36 AM on the day it is due (and each day thereafter at 4:00 PM), 10% will be deducted.

Please DO NOT put the paper under the instructor's door! Late (or early!) papers may be submitted directly to the instructor, may be turned in to office staff at the Department of Psychology office (BSP-217), or may be thumbtacked to the bulletin board outside the instructor's office (if the latter, any late penalties will be assessed based on when the instructor actually finds the assignment).

Paper References

What is a Peer Reviewed Journal?

A peer reviewed journal is an academic journal. "Journal" is just a fancy name for "magazine"; academics have been publishing, reading, and corresponding through journals since at least the seventeenth century. To publish in a modern academic journal you have to submit your paper (i.e., "article") to the journal's editor. The editor then finds two or three other academics that are knowledgeable about the subject matter of your paper to read and critique it (i.e., they "review" it). These readers, or "peers", determine if your paper is worth publishing. For this reason, papers that appear in peer reviewed journals can generally be counted on to have some academic merit. That is, you can have more confidence that the material in such a paper is valid.

Most of the journals in the libraries on campus are peer reviewed. Pretty much anything with the words "Journal of" in the title is guaranteed to be peer reviewed. If you flip open a peer reviewed journal you should be able to find a page that lists the editors and another page that gives instructions on how to go about submitting a paper for the review process. (Typically these pages are at the front or back of the journal.) If you can't these pages you probably don't have a peer reviewed journal.

By way of contrast, anybody can publish anything they want on a website or in a book (yes, there are publishers who will print anything you like as a book as long as you pay them for it). As such, one needs to be very critical of facts, ideas, and theories that one finds on websites and in books. Some books, such as those published by reputable academic publishing companies, are more trustworthy than others. Companies that make their money publishing for the academic community tend to protect their future income by ensuring that they don't publish questionable material or "crank" theories.

Finding References

There are a number of ways to find find material for your paper, however, I'll just mention one method here: the use of the University library's on-line databases. Send your web browser to www.library.ualberta.ca, the U of A library's website. Once there, take the Database link (it's toward the top of the page in a title bar). There are a variety of databases that you might use to find material for this paper, but I'll just mention two of them.

The first, PsycINFO, has a very good search engine that you can use to look for keywords, authors, journal titles, etc. and also lets you combine search terms using Boolean search parameters (e.g., AND/OR).

The second, Web of Science, has a weaker search engine, but is especially good at allowing you to find material related to an article or book that you've already found. Web of Science allows you to find all the articles, books, etc. that have been published which cite a particular source. For example, let's imagine you have managed to find an important artile on your topic published by Brown in 1975. You'd like to know who has been working and publishing on the same topic more recently. Using Web of Science's search engine you'd find the Brown (1975) article. The information page on this article will have a link somewhere near the top that says &quopt;Times Cited" followed by some number (e.g., 121). If you click on this link the website will give you a list of all the papers, books, etc. that have referenced Brown (1975) right up to the present. This is very handy for finding the most recent publications on a particular topic of interest.

APA Citation and Referencing Format

Using APA Style in Your Paper for Psychology 302

The American Psychological Association (APA) has a lot to say about the particular way that papers should be written and formatted. Some professors for whom you will write papers in other psychology classes may require you to conform very closely to the entire APA style for paper writing. For this assignment in Psychology 302 the only thing I really want you to use with respect to the APA style is their citation and referencing format.

APA Referencing Format

The APA has a particular referencing format that has been generally adopted by the majority of the psychology related journals that are published. APA referencing format is comprised of two components: first, the citation of sources in the text and second, the formating of references in the Reference List.

Instead of footnotes or end notes, APA style uses "parenthetical citation" format. This same style of citation is used in your textbook. For example, the first two citations in your textbook, on page 2 are:

"As Malik (2000) puts it: 'Culture is not a meare encrustation upon human nature, like dirt on a soiled shirt. It is an integral part of it because human nature can only be expressed through human culture' (see also Plotkin 1998)."

If you look up a reference for a journal article source in a Reference List, APA style dictates a particular order for the information which is as follows: Author(s) name(s), date of publication, title of article, title of journal, volume and issue number of journal, pages. Things are a little different for a book: Author(s) name(s), date of publication, title of book, place of publication of book, publisher of book.

Journals identify their publications by using volume numbers and often issue numbers. Generally, a journal publishes one volume per year, although their are exceptions to this. Each volume may have multiple issues. For example, if a journal publishes once a month, there would be twelve issues per volume; if the journal publishes six times in a year there would be six issues, etc.

For journal articles you should italicize (or underline) the journal title and the volume number. The volume's issue number, if you have it available, is put in parentheses after the volume, but is not italicized. For example, for issue 3 of volume 50, this would be: 50(3).

For a book you italicize (or underline) only the book's title.

Here are a few examples of some APA-formatted sources as they would appear in a Reference list. Take note of the specific punctuation that is used in the references (e.g., date in parentheses followed by a period).

For a journal article with a single author:
Pagel, M. (1997). Desperately concealing father: A theory of parent-infant resemblance. Animal Behaviour, 53, 973-981.

For a journal article with two authors:
Low, B.S., & Clarke, A.L. (1991). Resources and life course: Patterns in the demographic translition. Ethology and Sociobiology, 13, 463-494.

For a journal article with more than two authors:
Kuester, J., Paul, A., & Arnemann, J. (1994). Kinship, familiarity and mating avoidance in Barbary macaques, Macaca sylvanus. Animal Behaviour, 48, 1183-94.

For a book:
Plotkin, H. (1998). Evolution in Mind. London: Penguin.

For a book with two or more authors:
Barrett, L., Dunbar, R., & Lycett, J. (2002) Human Evolutionary Psychology. Great Britain: Palgrave.

For a chapter in a book:
Sabean, D. (1976). Aspects of kinship behaviour and property in rural Western Europe before 1800. In J. Goody, J. Thirsk, & E.P. Thomson (Eds.), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The above are only a few examples of referencing format. The APA publishes an official Style Manual that gives complete details. Each of the major libraries on campus (e.g., Rutherford, Cameron, Education) will have a copy of the APA Style Manual at their Reference Desk. Here are a few of on-line sources you might also check: http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c09_o.html, http://www.apastyle.org/apa-style-help.aspx, and http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/.

A few final comments about constructing a Reference List for a paper you have written. Only sources (e.g., articles, books, book chapters, etc.) that you have actually read and actually cited in the text of your paper are included in the Reference list. If you did not actually read a source it should not appear in the Reference list. Sometimes you might read about a source in an article or book that you either can't get access to or, perhaps, can't read because it is published in a foreign language. In this case, in the text of your paper you would indicate this by using the words "as cited by". For example,

Gorillas have a remarkably poor ability to hold their alcohol, despite an opposable thumb. Henderson & Stephenson (1947, as cited by Trumann, 1989) are the last known researchers to attempt to study gorillas' ability to operate within a cocktail party setting. The results were, needless to say, disasterous, and neither researcher survived the experience.

Arrange the sources in the Reference list alphabetically by the last name of the first (or only) author of the source. For sources with multiple authors, the ordering of the authors is not necessarily alphabetic, but is the order in which the authors are listed on the journal article or book (this generally reflects who has done the most work, who is most important, etc.). Indent the first line of a reference and skip a line between individual references.

So, if we use the sources I've listed above to construct a reference list, it would look like this:

     Barrett, L., Dunbar, R., & Lycett, J. (2002) Human Evolutionary Psychology. Great Britain: Palgrave.

     Kuester, J., Paul, A., & Arnemann, J. (1994). Kinship, familiarity and mating avoidance in Barbary macaques, Macaca sylvanus. Animal Behaviour, 48, 1183-94.

     Low, B.S., & Clarke, A.L. (1991). Resources and life course: Patterns in the demographic translition. Ethology and Sociobiology, 13, 463-494.

     Pagel, M. (1997). Desperately concealing father: A theory of parent-infant resemblance. Animal Behaviour, 53, 973-981.

     Plotkin, H. (1998). Evolution in Mind. London: Penguin.

     Sabean, D. (1976). Aspects of kinship behaviour and property in rural Western Europe before 1800. In J. Goody, J. Thirsk, & E.P. Thomson (Eds.), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Et al.

Some of you may have heard that there is a way to abbreviate long lists of authors using et al. as a placeholder for some of the names. For sources that have multiple authors can become tedious to have to read through all the athors each time the source is cited. For this reason, et al. is used as an abbreviation. However, there are very specific rules that govern the use of et al. First, et al. can only be used for sources with 3+ authors. Second, you must use the complete listing of authors' names and the date the first time you cite the source; thereafter you can abbreviate this by only including the name of the first author, followed by et al., and then the date. The only exception to this is if a source over five authors; in this case you may use the et al. abbreviation the first time you cite the source.